The Marrow Thieves

“Out here the stars were perforations revealing the bleached skeleton of the universe through a collection of tiny holes. And surrounded by these silent trees, beside a calming fire, I watched the bones dance.”

Before Frenchie learns about dreams being woven in his bones, he thinks of the stars in the night sky as the bones of the universe. By establishing that nature, too, has its own “bones,” Dimaline sets up a connection between the natural world and Indigenous peoples, where dreams are contained not just in the bones of people, but also in the bones of the world—a connection that proves to be the Natives’ secret weapon.

“‘Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones. That’s where they live, in that marrow there.’”

The “science” of how the schools extract dreams from bone marrow is unclear, as the process is intended as a metaphor. Miig’s explanation to Frenchie about dreams is a combination of Indigenous belief mixed with a bit of science, and reveals why whites are trying to steal marrow from the Indigenous population.

“‘We were great fighters—warriors, we called ourselves and each other—and we knew these lands, so we kicked a lot of ass.’”

Often in the novel, Dimaline mixes highly poetic language with colloquial, modern-day speech. This quote is an example of that effect, where Miig’s story starts off like a recitation of an epic and ends abruptly with slang and syntax more common of a teenager.